Category Archives: Education

A friend from graduate school (and a tenure track professor) just shared this article with me from The Atlantic and I suggest everyone read it. It seems that adjunct college professors are fed up with their current (slave) status…and they are organizing. While I agree with much of what they are saying – I fear that forming unions for better pay and benefits might get them a few dollars and a parking space – but it will not solve the longer term problem: the corporatiztion of higher education. The article hints at this fundamental issue without really hammering it home as a systemic flaw. I call for a more radical solution: a university-wide adjunct walk out and a public and very vocal denunciation of the system. Adjuncts who continue to take crap jobs and then complain about them are just as guilty as the universities. Reform is not enough. Adjuncts should quit and thus leave universities with no faculty. Only then will those in charge have to make some changes. What are your thoughts?

I’ve just finished reading an article in this month’s The Atlantic concerning how surreal things have gotten on college campuses concerning (among other things) potentially hurtful or offensive language in the classroom. It seems that students, in opposition to something called microaggression, have banded together to rid higher education of questionable language that could (unintentionally or not) invoke images of racism, sexism, violence, etc. Their mission is to create a “safe” environment.

The Atlantic finds this disturbing and is concerned that by caving to the hyper-sensitive demands of students we are not only homogenizing education but failing to prepare students for the real world – full of diverse, and yes…hurtful people and opinions.

All of this reassures me that I made the right decision rejecting the traditional professor path and moving on. I promise you that I would not react well to a student dictating what I said in class. I specialize in nineteenth-century United States history and guess what. People said some pretty nasty things back then. Call me crazy, but I think it is important we know exactly what those folks said – in their own words – and to whom they said it. Who knows…? Maybe we might learn something.

Back when I was at UC Riverside, I taught a class in Reconstruction Era history. On the syllabus, I mentioned – in a very short paragraph on the syllabus – that language and images would come up that most would (and should) find very disturbing. But that was it. Trust me, some things were mentioned in class, uttered or shown only in the context of the history, that I would never consider conveying outside of the classroom. And I never had a single indecent in which a student complained to the department or came to me in distress.

Of course, I was thinking of the obvious. It turns folks can construe nearly anything as offensive. So who knows what I might have said that ruffled some feathers…

To my fellow educators – what is your experience with these triggers? Are things as bad as the article makes it seem? Let’s talk…

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Across the Bloody Chasm – Now Available!!!

Praise for Across the Bloody Chasm

“One of Harris’s chief contributions is his recovery of lost ambiguities, intentions, and memories, which fairly quickly were obscured by national self-interest and the ignorance of Americans who did not fight or who were born after the war.” - American Historical Review

“Harris makes a persuasive case that in the battle for Civil War memory neither Union nor Confederate veterans were willing to concede much to their former enemies. . . . Across the Bloody Chasm makes a worthwhile addition to growing literature on historical memory of the American Civil War by demonstrating the limits of postwar reconciliation among veterans.” - Journal of American History

''Well written and accompanied by 84 pages of notes, a bibliography, and an index, the study . . . stands as a major contribution to a discourse still central to the polity of the US. Highly recommended.'' - Choice

“[An] uncommonly well written and concise book. . . . M. Keith Harris is to be commended for clarifying why the process of national reconciliation took much longer than we have previously recognized and the role that Civil War veterans played in it.” - Civil War Book Review

“Harris . . . makes extensive use of regimental histories as he believes they document the true views of the veterans. He also makes good use of the speeches and commemorative programs published during veterans’ gatherings over the decades after the war. . . . Harris’s treatment of the various issues and themes is a useful reminder of what our veterans, and our country, went through in the years after the Civil War as every American, but especially veterans, tried to digest the importance of the bloody conflict the country had endured and the role each of them had played in it.” - On Point